Jonathan Key

Stoned again?

The Modern Antiquarian would
provide useful hints to anyone wishing to publish a motoring atlas. A large-format
hardback, with half of the book colour-coded by geographical area, it is
ostentatiously designed for easy reference. The volume comes in a sturdy
slipcase for protection while travelling, in the garish colours usually
associated with a book one might need to locate quickly in a car packed
with foil-wrapped sandwiches and thermos flasks. This is, in fact, almost
certainly the thinking behind the publication. The Modern Antiquarian
is a road atlas,
an explorer's field guide, for the enthusiast questing after the earliest
signs of civilisation in the British Isles. Some of the peculiarities of
the book can be explained by reference to the reputation of its author.
Before striking out on his own, Julian
Cope was leader of The
Teardrop Explodes, a late Seventies band that mixed a punkish aesthetic
with its alleged antithesis: LSD-fuelled prog rock. The band collapsed,
to the accompaniment of stories of increasingly deranged behaviour on the
part of Cope. Whether or not one believes that he spent most of a recording
session hiding under the mixing desk, or chased the rest of the band through
a field with a shotgun, there is certainly a sense in which Cope himself
quickly became the subject of a Bacchanalian myth.
These days, with the impending republication in October of Head-On, his
unapologetic autobiography, that myth is largely carried by Cope himself.
The heavily illustrated pages contain a number of essays concerning the
author's eight-year project to rediscover and map the prehistoric features
still surviving in the landscape of modern Britain. As an exploration of
the (often precariously) surviving evidence of the megalith-building
era in British history, Cope's record is both unique and substantially
overdue. Some of the features he notes and illustrates have not been photographed
since the 1930s, or in the case of one cromlech in Wales, since 1893. The
essays chronicle the author's attempt to discover and understand the hundreds
of stone monuments pre-dating the Roman conquest which can be found in
the countryside.

These essays tend to confirm the
reader's suspicion that such a project is the work of some kind of New
Age enthusiast, and Cope is not exactly ashamed
of taking on such a role. He has written that he wishes to be a pied piper,
to help break [ordinary people] out of their existentialism, their physical
remove from life, their ennui, using the most Robert Graves-ean thoroughness
and the patience of a man driven by cascading Light. In fact, the comparison
to Graves is probably fair, as Cope explicitly matches a comprehensive
cast through the available literature with an unwavering sense of spiritual
purpose. Cope's personal myth can be set against the mythological past
from which he is attempting to rescue the stones and the other sites explored
in The Modern Antiquarian.
It is a confrontation that is relished, indeed pushed to the forefront
of the book, even as it pretends to be little more than a much-needed reference
work. The second section of the volume is a gazetteer, which not only lists,
but describes, illustrates and provides practical directions for over 300
ancient sites. However, it cannot rest at providing interested readers
with the means to discover for themselves these circles, standing stones
and inscriptions. The gazetteer insists on filling each site with Cope's
fairly unsurprising discourse of self-discovery, mind-expansion and escape
from the technological. The slipcase boasts as a selling point the presence
in the text of 50 poems, of marginal appeal to all but Cope's most die-hard
fans. It is reasonable to wonder what function these could possibly be
performing. The boast, it seems, is really of authentic experience, of
vicarious head-trips for the armchair seeker after gnosis. After reading
several entries, the portions of the gazetteer that begin to stand out
are the personal notes appended to each location, giving the author's on-the-spot
reactions. These offer Cope's subjective experiences of the wind, the rain,
even his pen running out, as somehow building to a consistently achievable
spiritual communion with the Earth Mother. Visiting the Maen-Y-Bardd at
Tal-Y-Fan (OS 115.740717), he senses 'the beauty irrigating every bit of
me whilst fairly blowing my head off at the same time'. For all of his
good intentions, this cannot help but draw away from the sites themselves,
and focus instead upon the author.

The photographs of the sites confirm
that this tactic is deliberate, if not consciously selfish. Cope is by
no means an expert photographer, but the snapshots exhibit a certain warmth
because they are so obviously the record of authentic, experienced moments.
More than half of them feature Cope, his partner, their child or their
dog. While this can usefully indicate scale, the photograph of Tinkinswood,
near Cardiff, reveals the stronger purpose of such photographic evidence.
Here, a large blanket has been laid out upon which the dog is being persuaded
to sit. On the opposite page, Cope's partner, looking at a dolmen,
stands profiled against the sky, so that we can see she is heavily pregnant.
The overall result is a narrative of a happy family life; exploring oneself
as one explores the lost heritage of Mystic Albion. Cope is selling a lifestyle,
an alternative set of pleasures, albeit fairly modest ones, to be found
by meandering along backways and through fields. This is consciously set
against the aggressive straight lines of the modern world. Indeed, Cope
is at his best when at his most overtly political. He sees little difference
between the way in which Roman roads run straight, ploughing through older
features and obliterating traditional
pathways, and the way in which contemporary building plans will butt
up against prehistoric monuments.

The political potential of this line
reaches its emotional culmination with the listing for Greycroft Stone
Circle in Cumbria. The main photograph shows that the owner of the land
has ploughed the field to within a couple of inches of the stones. The
inset picture shows the scene from the opposite angle, revealing the circle
to be no more than 400 yards from the stacks of Sellafield nuclear power
station. It becomes almost impossible to believe that the visual similarity
between the ancient stones and Sellafield's squat grey chimneys is a mere
accident of juxtaposition.

Such moments, however, are not sustained
under the pressure of Cope's insistence upon finding transcendence at each
of the sites, unquestionably beautiful though they are. The author is then
left with the problem of communicating the transcendence to the reader.
Cope appears to be caught between observation and participation. Perhaps
the most telling portion of the Cope myth concerns his presence at the
poll tax riots in Trafalgar Square. Cope himself, according to the story,
did not take part in the demonstration, but wandered through it unmolested,
dressed as a fairy-tale giant, neither quite observer nor detached.

The tension between observation and
participation is elegantly captured in the title of this book. After all,
the antiquarian cannot help but be modern. The Modern Antiquarian,
if it indicates anything, shows how Cope insists upon recreating the ancient
stones and their ambiguous markings according to a thoroughly modern system.
Even his dating conventions illustrate this. Ancient dates are given as
BCE (Before the Christian Era). Dates in recent history are recorded conventionally,
except when we reach the 1990s, when the suffix CE (Christian Era) is adopted.
These, the dates of Cope's shamanic
progress through Britain, are the most important in the book, and it
is these modern days, these days of the New Age, that are the most important
in its chronology.